T.J. Bonner pleaded not guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. He led the union from 1989 to 2011.
— Howard Lipin

San Diego 
In the two decades he led the labor union for the nation’s Border Patrol agents, T.J. Bonner carved a public profile as an aggressive advocate for his members and as a blunt, fearless critic of government policy.

Now Bonner, a Campo resident who retired from the agency two years ago, is bringing the same no-holds-barred approach to his biggest battle yet — fighting charges by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego that he defrauded the union out of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

Bonner’s lawyer, Eugene Iredale, has filed a slew of pretrial motions, attacking elements of the government’s case and challenging the very basis for the investigation that led to Bonner’s indictment in August.

Among the targets are the search warrants that federal investigators served on Bonner’s two-story home in March. Bonner is also seeking to have the case dismissed on unusual grounds — that the agents who led the criminal probe did not have the authority under federal law to do so.

Federal prosecutors have responded that the warrants were valid and the evidence seized from them should be allowed.

Bonner, 59, has pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. He was the leader of the National Border Patrol Council from 1989 to 2011.

The indictment says that during that time, he submitted false claims for reimbursement for wages, travel, meals and tickets to professional sports games. His reimbursement claims would say he had incurred the expenses while working on union business, when the government said he was not, and in many instances was actually visiting a mistress outside of Chicago.

The government said he defrauded the union out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bonner has countered by contending the investigation is a retaliation against him by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol for his years of work as the union leader and as a persistent thorn in their side.

In the March search, agents seized what Iredale described as “massive amounts of data” from various computers and computer data storage devices in Bonner’s home. Iredale said in court filings that the seizure went far beyond what was called for in a warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge.

Investigators, who had been looking into Bonner’s activities since late 2009 or early 2010, sought items such as bank records, financial statements and personal expense records.

Some 10,000 gigabytes of data — the equivalent of about 5 billion ﻿pages of text — were hauled out of the home, Iredale wrote in court papers. Included among those items are notes of “internal strategy discussions” of the labor union, performance appraisals, and emails between Bonner and a law firm that represented him before Iredale took on the case.

A second motion filed by Iredale challenges the investigation itself. The probe was headed by agents with the internal affairs section of Customs and Border Protection.

Iredale said federal rules governing criminal investigations only allow internal affairs agents to conduct criminal investigations if the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security first declines to conduct its own investigation and then agrees to oversee the investigation by internal affairs.